The Concept of Political Representation: Genealogy and Contemporary Developments
The Concept of Political Representation: Genealogy and Contemporary Developments
This research project examines both in historical and in theoretical terms the troubled and highly contingent relationship between representation and democracy. Hanna Pitkin, the author of the Concept of Representation (1967), the third most cited book of post- WWII political theory, has famously maintained that between representation and democracy prevails, at the very best, an uneasy alliance. Pitkin rightly stressed that democracy and representation are two concepts with disparate, even conflicting, histories. Representation, she warned, "has a problematic relationship with democracy, with which it is often thoughtlessly equated. The two ideas have different, even conflicting, origins. Democracy came from ancient Greece and was won through struggle, from below. Greek democracy was participatory and bore no relationship to representation. Representation dates - at least as a political concept and practice - from the late medieval period, when it was imposed as a duty by the monarch. Only in the English Civil War and then in the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions did the two concepts become linked." (Pitkin 2004) But in what terms was this link first forged? And how was it conceived and justified throughout modern history? What is more, is representative democracy, as Pitkin and others seem to suggest, an oxymoron, bringing together two contradictory concepts and practices, which are very likely to break apart once more? Or are there conditions under which representation can be fully democratic, and the basis of an original, even superior, form of democratic government, under which citizens of complex and pluralist societies , like those we inhabit, have good reasons to want to live? In other words, what are the justifications for democratic representation, and how ought the commitment to democratic self rule translate into the theory and the practice of political representation, including the obligations of representatives? These are some of the key questions that drive this research.
This research project examines both in historical and in theoretical terms the troubled and highly contingent relationship between representation and democracy. Hanna Pitkin, the author of the Concept of Representation (1967), the third most cited book of post- WWII political theory, has famously maintained that between representation and democracy prevails, at the very best, an uneasy alliance. Pitkin rightly stressed that democracy and representation are two concepts with disparate, even conflicting, histories. Representation, she warned, "has a problematic relationship with democracy, with which it is often thoughtlessly equated. The two ideas have different, even conflicting, origins. Democracy came from ancient Greece and was won through struggle, from below. Greek democracy was participatory and bore no relationship to representation. Representation dates - at least as a political concept and practice - from the late medieval period, when it was imposed as a duty by the monarch. Only in the English Civil War and then in the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions did the two concepts become linked." (Pitkin 2004) But in what terms was this link first forged? And how was it conceived and justified throughout modern history? What is more, is representative democracy, as Pitkin and others seem to suggest, an oxymoron, bringing together two contradictory concepts and practices, which are very likely to break apart once more? Or are there conditions under which representation can be fully democratic, and the basis of an original, even superior, form of democratic government, under which citizens of complex and pluralist societies , like those we inhabit, have good reasons to want to live? In other words, what are the justifications for democratic representation, and how ought the commitment to democratic self rule translate into the theory and the practice of political representation, including the obligations of representatives? These are some of the key questions that drive this research.
